Monday, March 30, 2015

The Chicago Cubs have reassigned top prospect Kris Bryant, who leads the majors with nine spring training home runs, to their minor league camp. The Cubs made the move Monday, less than a week before they open their season against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“We entered camp with the presumptive move being to send him to Triple-A,” Cubs president Theo Epstein said. “It’s always the presumptive [move] for us move with young players that haven’t played in the big leagues yet.”

Saturday, March 28, 2015

It’s time for everyone involved in the current Kris Bryant saga to shut up. For the good of the kid and — more vitally — the good of the game.

Everyone has had their say now, even the new commissioner. Everyone has staked their position. This should be the feel-good story of the spring. Instead, the rarest commodity in the sport — a young position player with the talent and charisma to attract fans — has been soiled.

As you may have noticed, there are a few Kris Bryant discussions on the site. One area of some contention is how the CBA actually works. I’ve seen one poster unequivocally state that keeping Bryant down won’t give the Cubs another year of Bryant’s play, even going so far as to say “I am so ####### tired of reading this. It is not about what years the Cubs have Bryant it is about how much they pay him in those years.” Debating such topics without factual information only makes the discussions ...

Thursday, March 26, 2015

I get that he’s trying to help his client become a free agent sooner but it’s also within the Cubs purview to send him down to the minors to gain another year and use Bryant’s defense as a reason to do so. If Boras really wants to get rid of the contract issue, he can agree to a contract which supersedes this issue. That won’t happen, of course. You don’t squeeze every penny out of a team signing such a contract. In the meantime, Scott, spare us the sanctimonious pontifications about “integrity ...

In today’s Pipeline Perspectives, Jonathan and I debate which farm system has been the most productive since the end of the 2009 season. My choice was the Nationals, who have developed three budding superstars in Stephen Strasburg, Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon, two more All-Stars in Ian Desmond and Derek Norris, plus a bunch of complementary players and trade fodder….

4. Royals
Kansas City nearly rode its system to a World Series championship last year, building the second-most ...

I’ve watched Baez quite a bit. He’s not ready at the plate. He seems compelled to flail at every breaking pitch away that gets served to him. From Maddon’s comment it also seems he’s not really taking to his coaching and might need to be humbled a bit more.

Maddon denied a report that Baez was on the final 25-man roster, and added that neither Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein or general manager Jed Hoyer gave the infieder the go-ahead either.

Monday, March 23, 2015

If Kris Bryant starts the season at Triple-A, the union should file a grievance, even though it would stand little chance of winning. New union chief Tony Clark should embrace the pending Bryant absurdity as the perfect opportunity to take a stand, knowing that bigger fights lie ahead with the collective-bargaining agreement expiring in 2016.

Why won’t Epstein simply acknowledge service-time considerations with Bryant? Presumably for the same reason that other executives follow the same ...

Kris Bryant, 23 years old, smiled and looked out over the tops of the heads around him. He’d hit two more home runs Saturday afternoon, one of them against Felix Hernandez, was batting .480, had played a capable third base and had all of Chicago Cubs fandom rallying behind him. The spring in which he’d been dared to play himself onto the team was going handsomely.

Cubs president Theo Epstein countered, “Kris Bryant’s development path has absolutely nothing to do with ownership, period. As with all our baseball decisions, I will determine where Kris begins the 2015 season after consulting with members of our baseball operations staff. Comments from agents, media members and anybody outside our organization will be ignored.”

Friday, March 13, 2015

As a side note, this might be one of the best “interview” teams Chicago has seen in a long time. From Miguel Montero—the catcher will almost certainly be the first to lose it if things go bad—to Dexter Fowler to Ross to newcomer Phil Coke, we won’t be hard-pressed to find a good quote.

Cubs decide to ban outside food from their spring training ballpark. It was apparently an overnight decision. Key bit:

I heard from a large number of people angry that they couldn’t bring peanuts or sunflower seeds into the ballpark. Really, Cubs? Really? REALLY? This sort of thing has been a time-honored tradition for decades—you buy a bag of peanuts outside the park from one of the street vendors and bring it inside. Or bring a sandwich from home, as I was going to today.

Saturday, March 07, 2015

The Chicago Cubs will pay for services for Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks after the funeral home that handled the arrangements jumped into the legal battle over the estate of the Hall of Famer with a claim for more than $35,000 it says it has not been paid.

The funeral home that handled services for Cubs Hall-of-Famer Ernie Banks says they’re owed $35,000 that hasn’t been paid.

The claim by Donnellan Family Funeral Services was filed Wednesday. It comes amid a legal challenge by Banks’ widow, ...

Crane Kenney’s statement indicates that they had considered playing an entire season—perhaps 2015?—at Miller Park, which would have given them from September 2014 to April 2016 to do significant work at Wrigley Field.

Logistically, this would have created significant issues for Cubs season-ticket holders who live, say, anywhere south of the Lake/Cook county line in Illinois. Even that line is about 70 miles from Miller Park; those season-ticket holders who ...